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Can You Imagine Riding In A Self-Driven Car?

Imagine driving in a car that does all the work for you – like Apple’s Siri voice technology, but at the wheel of the vehicle you’re riding in – your life, in other words, in the palm of a computer’s hand.

It’s not science fiction, either. This is technology already being developed.

Wired has a really interesting piece on self-driving cars, a technology that is moving forward full-steam-ahead as Google and all the major car manufacturers get behind the idea. Here’s a brief excerpt from the piece, as Tom Vanderbilt gets behind, and then lets go of, the wheel:

As we drive the Google car—or are driven by it—I watch the action unfold on the computer monitor mounted on the passenger side of the dashboard. It shows how the car is interpreting the world: lanes, signs, cars, speeds, distances, vectors. The rendering is nothing special—a lot of blocky wireframe that puts me in mind of Atari’s classic Battlezone. (The display is just one of a host of geeky details—to change lanes, for instance, the driver presses buttons marked Shift and Left on a keyboard near the monitor.) Yet it is absolutely fascinating, almost illicitly thrilling, to watch as the car not only plots and calculates the myriad movements of neighboring vehicles in the moment but also predicts where they will be in the future, like high-speed, mobile chess. Onscreen, the car is constantly “acquiring” targets, surrounding them in red boxes, tracing raster lines to and fro, a freeway version of John Madden’s Telestrator. “We’re analyzing and predicting the world 20 times a second,” Levandowski says.

A car comes speeding along the adjacent on-ramp. Do we accelerate or slow? It’s a moment that puzzles many human drivers. Our vehicle chooses to decelerate, but it can rethink that decision as more data comes in—if, for instance, the merging car brakes suddenly. The computer flags a car one lane over, maybe 30 feet in front of us, and slows imperceptibly. “We’re being held back by this guy because we don’t want to be in his blind spot,” Levandowski says. A bus suddenly looms next to us. “Even if you can drive in the center of the lane, down to the centimeter, that doesn’t mean it’s the safest route,” he says. And so the car drifts just a bit to the left to distance itself from the bus. “If you look at it, we’re not actually driving center, though we’re still not driving as bad as he is,” he says, pointing to a gray SUV ahead that’s straddling two lanes.

Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

What a fascinating glimpse into the future of the automobile. But as thrilling as it sounds, I can’t help but feel a little nervous.

Maybe I’m just jaded by so many blue-screens-of-death or various other glitches in my own personal technological history.

When my PC freezes up I can restart it or throw it out the window. When my phone has a bug, I can power it off or, well, throw it out the window. (See, I’m very handy at fixing these sorts of things…)

But what happens when my car has a computer error? What happens when your car gets a virus? What sort of control will government agents have over the operation of our vehicles once they’re all networked together?

It may spell the end of the high-speed car chase, but what does it say about our privacy? What sort of implications do autonomous, networked vehicles have about our own individual liberty?

Tom has similar concerns, noting that legal concerns such as who is responsible in the case of a malfunction or accident – for instance, who gets sued, the manufacturer or the driver? – create a regulatory thicket that can’t easily be resolved.

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Since Mr. Sebastian Thrun has created one, I know it exists. This means evan a child can go alone in a car and if your sleepy it’s not dangerous to drive. It would be like ‘name the area and reach there”. Less car accidents more safety.